It was beginning to a look a lot like Christmas while it should have been looking more like Halloween.

What gives?

Granbury City Manager Wayne McKethan said Monday that there is a reason why festive reds were going up as locals were focused on orange.

It had a lot to do with green.

“Some of these decorations take two and three hours each. We do not staff for this, so it’s handled on top of our normal duties,” McKethan said. “I’m certainly not for hiring more people to do that, so we work it into our schedule.”

In other words, hiring crews would have been more costly to the city than having city employees fit the decorating into their duties.

On Monday morning when McKethan made that comment, workers were outside his office, stringing lights on the bridge between City Hall and Shanley Park.

City workers, McKethan said, not only decorate on and around the square, but they also construct the popular lighted displays at Shanley Park.

The lighted wonderland will come to life on Friday, Nov. 23, the night after Thanksgiving. That’s the night of the annual Christmas parade.

McKethan said that city crews also are responsible for the strings of white lights that stretch from the four corners of the square all the way up to the top of the stately courthouse.

“That takes a significant amount of time,” he said. “There’s just a lot of work involved in getting the whole city decorated.”